SOURCE: "Hroswitha of Gandersheim and the Destiny of Women," The Historian, Vol. XLI, No. 3, February, 1979, pp. 295-314.

[In the following essay, Frankforter studies Hroswitha's dramatic exploration of the sources and models of spiritual strength available to women in Medieval society.]

There is a substantial fund of medieval literature which is relevant to the study of the roles, models, and ideals which medieval European society endorsed for women. Most of it was written by men whose educations and vocations gave them a limited capacity for the appreciation of women,' and it suggests that the medieval world was often rather harsh in its criticism of females. The version of the Christian faith which dominated the West during the Middle Ages promoted ascetic attitudes which were frequently pessimistic about feminine potentials,² and feudal society produced few women whose achievements in positions of power and respect could give the lie to the prevalent misogynic prejudices of their contemporaries. In most cases women found that their social roles were defined for them by the kinds of relationships which they established with men.³ Women could be wives and could expect in the marital situation to be required to submit to husbands who were to be honored as their natural masters. Women could be whores and could obtain a certain power by surrendering to the weakness of their female flesh and making themselves into fatal traps for the sexually vulnerable male. Or women could be career virgins who overcame the inadequacies of their flesh by refusing to practice the sexuality or cultivate the beauty which marked them as women. The reward for their strenuous renunciation of their feminine natures was often the acquisition of a remarkable degree of independence from male control and the opportunity to play a kind of man's role in society.⁴

Male intellectuals had no difficulty in accounting for what appeared to be a natural and universal order of masculine dominance. There was an ancient school of Biblical exegesis which taught that woman had been created subservient to man and had condemned herself to a position of permanent earthly subordination by her betrayal of her husband in the garden of Eden.⁵ There was also a secular tradition deriving from Greek science which explained woman's secondary social role as the inevitable result of her supposed biological inferiority.⁶ On the issues of feminine moral and physical inadequacies, religion and science found themselves in felicitous agreement with social custom, and it must, therefore, have been difficult for the citizens of medieval Europe, male and female, to see injustice in the inequality of opportunity and appreciation accorded the sexes.

One wonders how a medieval woman coped with this situation. How did an intelligent, perceptive female deal with an education and a society which frequently must have served to undercut her self-confidence and her self-respect? Few documents have as yet come to light which provide an opportunity for the exploration of this question. There was not a large number of medieval female authors, and of those women whose works do survive few have been identified who addressed themselves to the topic of the roles which they perceived for women in their world.⁷

The period of the "Ottonian Renaissance" produced a rare exception, a woman who created a body of literature which dealt directly and indirectly with the subject of feminine options in medieval society.⁸ Apart from the facts that she called herself Hroswitha and that she was a resident of the Saxon cloister of Gandersheim almost nothing is known about her personal history. On the basis of her works it can be inferred that she lived approximately from 935 to 1002,⁹ and her presence in the elite house at Gandersheim argues for the assumption that she was of noble birth. But her family has yet to be identified, and the source of her excellent education remains obscure.¹⁰

During the course of her career Hroswitha experimented with three different kinds of literature. Her earliest works are contained in a collection of eight poems which narrate saints' legends and apocryphal accounts of the life of Mary and the ascension of Christ.¹¹ After the composition of the eight legends Hroswitha turned her attention to a cycle of six plays which she says she designed to counter the influence of Terence's popular pagan comedies.¹² They are the earliest extant attempts at the creation of a Christian theater and the only dramas known to have been written in the period between the decline of Rome and the appearance of the mystery plays of the twelfth century.¹³ Hroswitha's last works, poems on the reign of Otto I and the background of the cloister at Gandersheim,¹⁴ are also noteworthy for their originality; they may qualify Hroswitha for acclamation as the first woman in the West to try her hand at the writing of history.¹⁵

Despite the unusual nature of Hroswitha's achievements, interest in her compositions seems to have faded after her death, and it was not until the humanist Conrad Celtes edited and published all but one of her extant works in the early sixteenth century¹⁶ that Hroswitha succeeded in attracting much scholarly attention.¹⁷ The fact that she was a woman who wrote dramas at a time when dramas were not supposed to have been written and women not equipped with educations adequate to achieve what she achieved made it difficult to place her work in a context which would facilitate its interpretation.¹ All too frequently, therefore, she has been treated as a phenomenon of the period of her "rediscovery," the sixteenth century,'9 or as simply another medieval "monk" who wrote about saints and martyrs. All too infrequently has serious attention been given to the significance of her feminine gender and her interest in women as her subjects.²⁰

Women are primary figures in three of Hroswitha's legends; they are the subjects of all six of her plays;²¹ the history of Gandersheim quite naturally centers on the careers of women; and the poem dedicated to the reign of Otto I devotes a surprising amount of space to the story of the women associated with the imperial family.²²

Hroswitha's references to her female characters and to her own feminine nature are often seemingly as unsympathetic as those of many a medieval male observer. Hroswitha seems to have believed that in the strengths of both mind and body women were clearly inferior to men. Given the nature of her education in early Christian theology and her experience in participating in the liturgy of her cloister, it would have been difficult for her to think otherwise.²³ In the preface to her saints' legends she confessed that poetry might be considered a difficult art for someone of her sex,²⁴ but she excused her attempts at it by asserting that even slight talents ought not to be wasted when God's grace can give them a worth which excels their inherent limitations. In a letter which she wrote to introduce her six plays to a group of male scholars who had encouraged her work, she engaged in an orgy of self-abnegation. She expressed amazement that these men should deign to pay any attention to the little works of a worthless, weak woman.²⁵ She admitted that she had some knowledge but claimed that the real subtleties of art eluded her feminine abilities.²⁶ In conclusion she suggested that if her work had any excellence, God had provided it so that His power might be all the more clearly manifested by the weakness of the vehicle which it employed, for, as she recalled, it is generally believed that a woman's understanding is slower than a man's.²⁷ In the prologue to the poem on the reign of Otto I, she begged mercy from potential critics and asked them to remember the weakness of her sex.²⁸ During the course of the narration she refused to discuss topics such as war which she claimed were beyond the ability of fragile women,²⁹ and she ultimately laid down her pen with the declaration that her female nature was not equal to the task of memorializing Otto's great achievements.³⁰

Much of this might be dismissed merely as a polite artifice of self-effacement, but Hroswitha is elsewhere not above an occasional remark disparaging the supposedly characteristic limitations of other members of her sex. In her history of Gandersheim she reported that Queen Aeda was so startled by a vision of John the Baptist that she fainted "according to the custom of women."³ Later in the same poem she recorded that the nuns of Gandersheim were moved to boundless grief at the news of Duke Otto's death because of the deficiencies of their female minds.³² In the legend of St. Basilius she described a courageous girl as one who put aside her feminine weakness and took on manly fortitude.³³

Hroswitha seems to have believed that there was a hierarchical structure in nature and society, and in that structure women were created inferior to men.³⁴ It was only right, therefore, that they should behave toward men with a degree of deference and submissiveness. But that did not rob women of all independent value or worthwhile uniqueness. Given God's ability—one might almost say His tendency—to manifest His infinite power through the weaker members of the human community,³⁵ the mental and physical inadequacies of women might possibly give them a kind of spiritual advantage. The very real strengths of men constituted temptations to sins of ambition and arrogance which were much less likely to confront women who were inevitably conscious of their innate humility. The natural humility of women made them excellent instruments for the manifestation of divine grace, and when the power of God did work through a human female channel, the earthly distinctions of strength and wit which normally divided the sexes became petty and irrelevant.

This is an idea which Hroswitha intentionally developed in her six plays, but it appears also at relevant points in her other works. In the preface to her plays Hroswitha acknowledged at least two motives which governed her dramatic compositions. The first was the hope that her Christian work might somehow counter the dangerous influence of Terence's pagan plays.³⁶ The second was the desire to respond to Terence's slanderous treatment of women. Terence's stories celebrated the shameful and impure deeds of wanton women. Hroswitha dedicated her works to the glorification of heroines of chastity,³⁷ and she pointed out the lesson she wished to teach by warning her reader in advance that her study of good women served to reveal the way in which God's grace enabled the weakness of women to confound the strength of men.³⁸

Hroswitha seemed to accept male dominance as a fact of life, and she did not suggest alternatives to traditions which limited women to the three common social roles of virgin, wife, or whore. But as a woman Hroswitha was sensitive to shades of distinction within these categories, and she had well-defined opinions about the spiritual potentials and options of the women who occupied them. In her works Hroswitha examined each of the traditional feminine roles, and in each role she described a woman's progress toward integrity and self-respect.

The obvious model for all women was, of course, the Virgin Mary. Hroswitha was profuse in her praise of the Virgin,³⁹ and she dedicated the first and longest of her saints' legends to a narration of Mary's early career.⁴⁰ Mary was, however, something of an anomaly,⁴¹" and Hroswitha could not present her simply as a literal role model for ordinary women. Hroswitha saw combined in the conditions of Mary's life the two laudible feminine vocations which she recognized: virginity and motherhood. Divine grace made it possible miraculously for Mary to fulfill both roles simultaneously and thus to be the perfect woman,⁴² but this option was available to no other earthly female. In this sinful world women had to choose between the two types of fulfillment available to them and be content with a partial completion of their natures.

There was not the slightest question in Hroswitha's mind about the identity of the superior choice. Virginity was the highest of human conditions. Virgins were destined to receive special "crowns"⁴³ in heaven; they were to have a song of praise to God which only they could sing;⁴⁴ they were to stand in the most intimate of relationships with Christ, relationships which were so close that they could be described by marital metaphors. They were literally to be the spouses of Christ who were to enter his "bridal chamber"⁴⁵ and share his embraces.⁴⁶ So like marriage was their bond with him that the mother of a virgin might speak of herself as the "mother-in-law"⁴⁷ of Christ.

Hroswitha was aware of a number of different problems which might confront the woman who made this noblest of choices and sought to preserve her virginity. In her first play, the Gallicanus, she dealt with a situation which must have formed part of the experience of many an aristocratic female. The Gallicanus is a play about the Emperor Constantine's daughter, Constantia, and her effort to win acceptance for her personal decision to serve God as a virgin. As a good Christian, Constantia's father, Constantine, was in favor of her choice of vocations, but he was not entirely free to assist her. The daughters of feudal noblemen were sometimes needed for bestowal in marriage as pledges and bonds for important family alliances, and their personal preference for the cloister may often have come into open conflict with their duty to their families. So it was with Constantia whose desire to maintain the virgin state was a luxury her father could ill afford. The support of his most powerful general, Gallicanus, was needed in order to win a war against the Scythians—a war which was crucial to the health of the empire—and for his loyal service Gallicanus wanted the reward of Constantia's hand in marriage. Constantia refused even to consider the possibility of marriage,⁴⁸ but she was clever enough to avoid a confrontation. She bent her principles enough to allow Gallicanus to believe that she would marry him when he returned victorious from the war, and in the interim she worked with God for his conversion to Christianity and chastity—terms which Hroswitha considered to be virtually synonymous. Constantia's faith was bountifully rewarded. In the heat of battle Gallicanus was converted; he renounced his earthly loves, embraced the life of a hermit, and ultimately made the supreme Christian sacrifice of martyrdom. Constantia's decision to maintain her virginity not only made her a heroine of the faith; it redirected, purified, and saved the man who had sought to exercise his baser nature through her.

Real human males were not all as responsive to religious stimuli as Gallicanus, however, and Hroswitha believed that occasionally God intervened rather violently to remove suitors who refused to honor a virgin's choice of vocation. In her history of Gandersheim Hroswitha told the story of the Abbess Gerberga I (d. 896) who had been betrothed in her youth to a certain Bernard.⁴⁹ Bernard insisted upon having her in marriage even though she plainly stated her preference for the cloister, and since Bernard remained intractable, God found it necessary to cause him to fall in battle to prevent him from working his impious assault on her purity.⁵⁰ Hroswitha considered the repudiation of sex to be such a laudable vow that she believed that God was not beyond doing drastic favors for married ladies who wished to escape their legal husbands and enter the cloister. In the history of Gandersheim she suggested that God probably caused Duke Liudulf to die at an early age so that his wife Oda could sever her ties with the world and embrace the monastic life.⁵¹ One hopes that Liudulf received suitable consolation in heaven.

Hroswitha was enough of a realist to understand that not every woman who preferred to preserve her virginity would find an easy way to attain her goal. Sometimes the protection of virginity might require life-and-death struggles against overwhelming odds. Hroswitha was confident, however, that in each such situation the congruence between the woman's desire and the will of God would provide her with miraculous ability to stand against all the powers of this world and, when necessary, would inspire in her the courage to embrace martyrdom. A woman by herself was a weak thing, but a woman who was with God was an invincible force. The model for Hroswitha's virgin heroines is St. Agnes whose story she tells in the last of her eight saints' legends. Agnes was a young citizen of pagan Rome who confessed Christianity and aspired to the condition of "angelic virginity."⁵² Unfortunately for her resolution she was an attractive girl of noble birth who inspired an infatuation in the son of the prefect of the city. When she spurned the boy in no uncertain terms, he fell ill from despondency, and his father resolved to force her to give up her Christian goals. The prefect had her thrown into a bordello, but the grace of God surrounded her with a holy light which intimidated any youth who approached her.⁵³ After working a series of miracles which converted both the prefect and his son, she was granted the release of martyrdom and ascended to heaven as a kind of inspiration for determined Christian women.⁵⁴

In her plays the Sapientia and the Dulcitius Hroswitha narrated tales about two trios of young virgins who emulated Agnes's example. In the Sapientia three sisters goaded their male captors into doing their worst and joyfully embraced martyrdom after they had demonstrated the invincibility of their chastity. It could not have escaped Hroswitha's attention, however, that occasionally a virgin's defenses might be penetrated against her will, and in the Dulcitius she hinted at a saving technicality in cases of rape. The three ladies of the Dulcitius were prisoners and had the bad luck to inspire the passions of their pagan captor who, for convenience of access, had them locked up in his pantry. When he attempted to assault them, God inspired a delusion in him, and he mistook the soot-blackened kettles of the kitchen for the objects of his lust. The three seemingly defenseless women thus made a fool of a powerful man and hastened eagerly toward their rewards as virgin martyrs. When the last and youngest girl was brought out for execution, her tormentor, who had finally grasped the nature of her values, attempted to intimidate her with a fate worse than death. If she refused to deny her faith, he threatened to confine her in a whorehouse where her body would be defiled and she would be barred eternally from the heavenly company of the virgins. She responded to his ultimatum by asserting that it was better to injure the body than to corrupt the soul and proposed a theory of technical virginity which was based on the idea that it was not the act of sex, but the sensation of pleasure, which stained one with sin. So long as the soul did not consent to the rape of the flesh, the physical condition of the body was irrelevant.⁵⁵ Frigidity was a final and unconquerable defense of chastity.

The vocation of the Christian virgin was Hroswitha's own, and she could easily describe the strengths of resolve, faith, and determination which went into its maintenance. She had a great deal more difficulty, however, in understanding the mind of the woman who chose the other acceptable Christian alternative and willingly surrendered virginity for motherhood. From time to time Hroswitha put very harsh condemnations of marriage into the mouths of her virgin heroines. The Virgin Mary rejected marriage as a condition which polluted the spirit with foul desires and made it an unfit temple for God.⁵⁶ In the "Basilius" legend a girl who begged her father to allow her to marry was warned that the pleasure which she sought in this world would bring her eternal punishment in the next.⁵⁷ St. Agnes asserted that the chaste soul could acknowledge only Christ as its spouse, and the man who offered her marriage found himself regarded as the next thing to a demon.⁵⁸ In the Gallicanus the princess Constantia claimed that she would "rather die" than marry.⁵⁹ In the Dulcitius the three virgin heroines rejected offers of marriage as invitations to corrupt their integrity.⁶⁰ In Hroswitha's mind there often appeared to be no middle ground between virginity and illicit love where honor might be found for marriage.⁶¹

Marriage was, however, a vocation for women that was acceptable to the church, and it was the condition in which the noble patrons of the cloister of Gandersheim lived. Hroswitha was required, therefore, to find some dignity in it, and in the final analysis she gave her approval to two kinds of marriage: those which were conducted as merely legal unions in which the parties lived as man and wife without sexual relations, and those which were established as a necessary means for the production of children.⁶² In the play the Sapientia the Emperor Hadrian is startled to learn that one of the effects of the conversion of Roman women to Christianity is that they refuse any longer to eat or sleep with their husbands.⁶³ Drusiana, the heroine of the Callimachus, and her husband are described as faithful practitioners of sexless Christian marriage. Such disciplines were, however, virtuosi achievements for ascetic athletes and were dangerous to recommend for general practice.⁶⁴

Most women found themselves in marriages which involved sexual unions, and Hroswitha could speak with respect of their vocations. The queens and princesses of the royal family were described as honorable consorts who enjoyed sweet and loving relationships with their husbands.⁶⁵ But as good and religious women Hroswitha seems to have believed that even they were eager, when the opportunity arose, to renounce the role of wife for the spiritually superior profession of the nun.⁶⁶ In her works of fiction, where she was somewhat insulated from the dangers of offending the persons whose deeds she memorialized in her historical poems, she clearly stated her belief that in heaven virgins were destined eternally to take precedence over married women. In the play the Sapientia Hroswitha produced her clearest analysis of the vocation of Christian motherhood. Sapientia was the mother of three young girls who shared her enthusiasm for the Christian faith and for the rewards of martyrdom. As they waited in prison for their final trials, the mother told her daughters what she hoped to achieve through them. She told them that she had raised and nourished them so that she might present them to a heavenly husband and win for herself the honor of being the "mother-in-law of the eternal king."⁶⁷ The virginity of her daughters was to be a crown for her in heaven, and their martyrdoms were to redound to her glory.⁶⁸ They were the "hope" of her womb,⁶⁹ and their special relationship to Christ in heaven would give them the opportunity to plead for her.⁷⁰ In her final prayer for herself before her own death, she hoped only to be able to hear her daughters in heaven, for she acknowledged the fact that she would never be able to "sing the song of virginity" and join them in their close association with Christ.⁷ Hroswitha's view of marriage seemed to be much like that of St. Jerome: it was an institution which redeemed itself in part by the production of virgins, but it was in itself a rather base condition.⁷²

Beyond the nun and the mother Hroswitha recognized one other major vocation for a woman—that of the whore. It is an alternative which she noted with understandable horror, but with surprising sympathy. She narrated the careers of prostitutes in two of her plays, the Abraham and the Paphnutius. In both dramas the fallen women become models of triumphant Christian faith by means of strenuous acts of self-renunciation—a scenario which is common enough in medieval literature, but which Hroswitha developed with unusual sensitivity and psychological insight. The Abraham deals with a young girl who attempted to live the ascetic life of a desert anchorite but who was seduced by the devil into surrendering her virginity and into despairing of her salvation. Thinking herself to be eternally damned she left her hermitage and took up residence in a tavern as a prostitute. Her spiritual mentor sought her out, convinced her that sincere repentance would restore her to God's favor, and led her back to the desert to resume her holy life. In the Paphnutius Hroswitha told the tale of Thais, the supreme whore of Alexandria, who was a much worse sinner than the poor little fallen nun of the Abraham. Unlike the nun of the Abraham Thais was not deceived into her sin but chose her way of life in full knowledge of its opposition to the will of God.⁷³ Even Thais, however, was not beyond redemption. When her spiritual advisor touched her conscience, her woman's nature proved strong enough to renounce all the vanities of the world and to undertake exhausting penances. She had a few last-minute qualms when she contemplated the unhygienic potential of her future situation,⁷⁴ but she allowed herself to be walled up in a tiny cell where for three years she performed remarkable feats of self-mortification before proceeding to an honored place in heaven.

In retrospect Hroswitha's women appear to be strong, courageous, and resourceful people. The weakness, cowardice, and intellectual torpidity which Hroswitha identified as the general features of her sex⁷⁵ are conspicuous by their absence from the personalities of her heroines. In the course of her work Hroswitha focused attention on about twenty women, and in contrast to the numerous men whom she described, only one of them was a contemptible creature.⁷⁶ Almost all of Hroswitha's women were able by wit, courage, and faith to win out over the physical power of men,⁷⁷ the temptations of this world, and the failures of their own pasts. Almost all of them turned out to be instruments of grace for their own salvation and for that of the men who surrounded them. They enjoyed no unusual advantages. They were simply women who occupied the normal roles which society defined for females, but they were women who found in these roles a power and influence over themselves and others which far exceeded normal expectations. Evidently there were feminine attributes which could form bases for strong personalities and influential careers even for women who were trapped in stereotyped social roles. In the powers of mind and body women might well be weaker than men, but their earthly weaknesses could become a source of spiritual strength.⁷⁸

Hroswitha understood the Christian religion to be a faith which offered the fellowship of God to those who severed their ties with the perverted flesh. Salvation was not earned by ascetic exercises; it was a gift of grace.⁷⁹ But the reception of salvation always involved a turning away from this world and a focusing of affections on the spiritual realm; it always entailed a repudiation of the transient pleasures of sex which seem to have symbolized for Hroswitha the very essence of human sin.⁸⁰

Contrary to what many other medieval scholars may have thought,⁸ Hroswitha seems to have believed that women have an important spiritual advantage over men in the struggle to maintain the crucial Christian virtue of chastity. Hroswitha's female characters are noteworthy for their lack of sexual passion. Only three of them demonstrate any difficulty in struggling with the impulses of the body. Two of the three, the virgin in the "Basilius" legend and the young anchorite of the Abraham play, are temporarily betrayed by their naivete into the snares of the devil, and the third woman, St. Gongolf s wife, is an unnatural creature whose pride drives her to persist furiously in her sins even after she has had numerous miraculous demonstrations of her husband's sanctity. Hroswitha's virgin martyrs deal with threats to their chastity which arise outside themselves. Rarely is there a suggestion that they faced difficult internal battles with the impulses of their flesh.⁸² Even the prostitutes, Mary and Thais, conduct their professions with a kind of cold detachment which suggests that they are only doing their jobs and not seeking fulfillment for raging erotic impulses.

In most instances lust appears to be a characteristically male problem. The servant in the "Basilius" legend is so overwhelmed by desire for his master's daughter that he sells his soul to the devil in order to get her. St. Agnes's suitor sickens and takes to his bed from the effects of his frustrated passions. The villain of the Callimachus is so completely mastered by his baser impulses that he breaks into his beloved's tomb in order to use her corpse for the satiation of his desires. Thais has such power over males that even men of character and substance lose their wits and brawl over her until her doorstep runs red with the blood of their battles.⁸³ The devil was at the root of all these disorders, but he seems often to have found it easier to work his assaults on chastity through men than through women.

Perhaps Hroswitha wished to imply that men, who enjoyed a greater measure of the powers of this world than women did, were subjected by their stronger flesh to more violent sexual impulses. Their strength of flesh in and of itself constituted a vulnerability of spirit which placed them in great danger and which created a serious problem for the women who aroused them. For better or for worse most males needed females in order to indulge their sinful impulses,⁸⁴ and the struggle for the soul's salvation could often degenerate into a battle between the sexes. It was of crucial importance, therefore, how women handled their sexuality. If they restrained its use, they could purify and ennoble men; if they indulged it, they could become a trap for innumerable male souls.⁸⁵ If they abandoned chaste conduct, they became the most effective tools the devil could employ; if they guarded their virginity—unto martyrdom if necessary—they became powerful instruments of divine grace in the struggle against sin.

In the natural order of creation men led and cared for the "weaker vessels"⁸⁶ who were their women. The weakness of female nature, which consisted in being closer to the animal world than was male nature, gave women, in the opinion of some, the greater capacity for sex and made them a source of huge potential danger to themselves and men. Patristic literature provided Hroswitha with many versions of this argument—which she seems to have accepted as self-evident. But in her dramatic representation of the sexuality of her feminine protagonists, women are most often portrayed as passive potentials for danger to members of the male sex, not as possessors of an independent drive which sought its own destructive fulfillment. Hroswitha seems to have accepted the common opinion that a woman's innate sexual abilities were greater than a man's—Thais seems to have single-handedly undermined the condition of most of the men in Alexandria. But Hroswitha represented a woman's internal fight for salvation as a struggle, not with the active impulses of her own nature but with the strengths of the men who attempt to sin through her. Feminine weakness is vulnerability to guilty exploitation, but, in so far as it entails a lack of drive and initiative, it constitutes a kind of protection against sin. Male strength, if misdirected, is not always virtue; female weakness, if properly utilized, is not always vice. Under the dispensation of grace made necessary by human sin, God reveals apparent strengths to be weaknesses and works through the lowly for the salvation of the mighty. Hroswitha of Gandersheim accepted the secondary role which her society accorded women, but she seems to have seen in the Christian dynamics of sin and salvation a destiny which gave women great worth and a basis for self-respect. For all their apparent weaknesses women were not mere adjuncts to men; they had their own superb and unique opportunities to serve as channels of divine grace. The decisions which women freely made about themselves were of more than personal importance. It was a woman's destiny to be the center of the battle between the realms of the flesh and the spirit, and it lay within a woman's power to have considerable influence on the outcome of the fight for the salvation of her race.

Notes

¹ Recent enthusiasm for the study of the history of feminism has produced much interest in the attitudes of men toward women in the ancient and medieval worlds. Useful surveys of theses and sources can be found in Marie-Louise Portmann, Die Darstellung der Frau in der Geschichtsschreibung des früheren Mittelalters (Diss. phil.) (Basel: Basler Beiträge, Bd. 60, 1958); Derrick Sherwin Bailey, The Man-Woman Relation in Christian Thought (London: Longmans, 1959); K. E. Børreson, Subordination et Équivalence: Nature et rôle de la femme d'après Augustin et Thomas d'Aquin (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1968); and Vemn L. Bullough, The Subordinate Sex: A History of Attitudes toward Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

² A suggestive theory concerning the history of a Christian tradition of ambivalence toward women has recently been advanced by George H. Tavard, Women in Christian Tradition (London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973). There is a growing body of literature on this subject. See, for example, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Sexual Relation in Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959); Vem L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976); Jeffrey B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972); H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1964); Henry C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, 4th rev. ed. (Secaucus, N.J.: University Books, 1966); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958); William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); and Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken Books, 1975).

³ Rosemary R. Ruether, "Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church," in Religion and Sexism, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 163-64.

⁴ Women who manifested the virtues of courage, strength, and self-control seem to have been praised often by their medieval biographers for their success in abandoning their female natures and acquiring male characteristics. For an example of a woman's adoption of this pro-male convention, see Anna Comnena's description of her mother in Alexiad 15.2. Similar phenomena are discussed in R. A. Baer, Jr., Philo's Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden: Brill, 1970); Henry Stanley Bennett, The Pastons and Their England (Cambridge: University Press, 1951); and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977).

⁵ Saint Paul claimed that the male was created to be "the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man" (1 Cor. 11: 7, RSV), and the Pastoral Epistles argued that woman's primordial sinfulness condemned her to subordination to man (1 Tim. 2: 11-15)—a theme which Tertullian (De Cultu Feminarum) and other church fathers found useful for polemical purposes.

⁶ Plato, Timaeus 90, suggested that the difference between the sexes could be explained by assuming that nature created women from the reincarnated souls of inferior men. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 4.6.775lb15, suggested that females could be understood as "deformities" which occur as a regular part of nature.

⁷ The number of female commentators on the feminine situation has on occasion been seriously underestimated. In her popular work, The Second Sex (New York: Alfred Knopf. 1968), 105, Simone de Beauvoir erroneously claimed that prior to the fifteenth century and Christine de Pisan no woman could be seen "to take up her pen in defense of her sex."

⁸ It is immediately apparent to anyone who reads Hroswitha's works that there are many references in them to women and much, therefore, which might be learned indirectly about their condition in Hroswitha's world. But the author feels that one can go beyond this and assume that at least in the case of Hroswitha's plays Hroswitha intended to describe directly feminine roles relevant to her society. This theory was presented to the Ohio Conference on Medieval Studies, October 1975, in a paper entitled "The Drama of Salvation: Sex Roles in the Plays of Hroswitha of Gandersheim."

⁹ In the Primordia, her history of Gandersheim, Hroswitha states that she was born well after the death of Duke Otto (912), and in the preface to her legends she says that she was a little older than her abbess, Gerberga II (940-1001). Her extant works do not deal with events later than the death of Otto I (973), but there is a second dedication of the Gesta Ottonis which honors Otto II and which may have served as an introduction to an intended, but uncompleted or now lost, continuation of the poem. The chronicle of the bishops of Hildesheim infers that she survived to write in honor of all three Ottos and thus supports the assumption that she lived at least into the early eleventh century. For a discussion of the problem of Hroswitha's dates, see Sister Mary Bernardine Bergman, Hrosvithae Liber Tertius (Covington, Ky.: The Sisters of St. Benedict, 1943).

¹⁰ Hroswitha sends her works for approval to a number of learned men who seem to have encouraged her studies, but she says little about her teachers. In the preface to her first works, her saints' legends, she notes her scholarly indebtedness to her novice mistress, Riccarda, to Riccarda's unnamed successors, and to her younger contemporary and friend, the Abbess Gerberga II.

¹¹ The legends bear the titles "The History of the Nativity and the Laudible Conversation of the Virgin Mother of God which I have found under the Name of St. James, the Brother of the Lord" (hereafter cited as the "Maria"), "Of the ascension of the Lord, the Narration which Bishop John Translated from Greek into Latin," "The Passion of the Martyr St. Gongolf," "The Passion of St. Pelagius, the Most Precious Martyr who was Crowned with Martyrdom in Cordoba in our Times," "The Fall and Conversion of the Vicar Theophilus," "Basilius," "The Passion of the Distinguished Martyr St. Dionysius," and "The Passion of the Virgin and Martyr St. Agnes."

Hroswitha's poems are not very unusual products for their day, but they have attracted some interest in that one of them, the "Pelagius," supposedly derives from an eyewitness account of the martyr's death and another, the "Theophilus," introduces the "Faustian" theme of a compact with the devil which was later to play a significant role in the literature of Hroswitha's homeland.

¹² The plays are the Gallicanus (parts 1 and 2), the Dulcitius, the Callimachus, the Abraham, the Paphnutius, and the Sapientia.

In the preface to the plays Hroswitha speaks of the spiritual dangers which confront those who read Terence and of her intention to oppose the lascivious impression made by his work by using the dramatic idiom to praise the virtues of female virgins and martyrs. Her actual reliance on Terence appears to have been slight. See Cornelia C. Coulter, "The 'Terentian' Comedies of a Tenth-Century Nun," Classical Journal 24 (1929): 515-29.

¹³ Mary Marguerite Butler, Hrotsvitha: The Theatricality of Her Plays (New York: Philosophical Library, 1960), and Edwin H. Zeydel, "Were Hroswitha's Dramas Performed during Her Lifetime?" Speculum 20, no. 4 (1945): 443-56, marshal evidence bearing on the problem of deciding whether Hroswitha ought to be interpreted as an author who stands in the tradition of drama prepared for reading or for actual performance.

¹⁴ Hroswitha may also have composed a no-longer-extant essay on the lives of Popes Anastasius and Innocent whose relics were preserved at Gandersheim, or the vague reference to this "work" which appears in a sixteenth-century source may simply be a misleading citation of the Primordia in which these two saints are mentioned.

¹⁵ Georgina Buckler, Anna Comnena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 4, claims that Anna Comnena, author of the Alexiad, deserves the title of "first woman historian of the western world." The Alexiad is an indisputably greater achievement than Hroswitha's modest "family history"—as the Gesta Ottonis has been characterized by Sister Mary Gonsalva Wiegand, The Non-Dramatic Works of Hroswitha (St. Meinrad, Indiana: Abbey Press, 1937), xx. But Hroswitha's ventures precede Anna's by a century and a half, and they deserve some recognition.

¹⁶ In 1501 Celtes published an edition of the manuscript from the cloister of St. Emmeran in Regensburg—now preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich (clm 14485)—which is the major extant medieval record of her work. It contains all her compositions except for the Primordia, the medieval copy of which disappeared in the sixteenth century. The St. Emmeran document appears to be a tenth-century product of Gandersheim and probably preserves the order in which Hroswitha expected her works to be read. Very few other medieval copies of her writings have survived. The Munich Staatsbibliothek contains (clm 2552) a twelfth-century copy of the Gallicanus which may derive from the St. Emmeran document. Late twelfth-century versions of the Gallicanus, Dulcitius, Callimachus, and Abraham were identified in the collection of the Historisches Archiv in Cologne (W 101) in 1922. They may derive from an original text which was superior to the St. Emmeran manuscript. Twelfth- or thirteenth-century fragments of the Mary legend and the Sapientia, which belong to the St. Emmeran tradition, have been discovered in Austria in the Klagenfurt Studienbibliothek (ms. 44).

Evidence of medieval interest in Hroswitha is quite sparse, but enough traces survive in the form of the few scattered manuscripts to indicate that she was not completely forgotten by those who followed her. See Boris Jarcho, "Zu Hrotsvithas Werkungskreis," Speculum 2 (1927): 343-44; and Edwin H. Zeydel, "Knowledge of Hrotsvitha's Works Prior to 1500," Modern Language Notes 59 (1944): 382-85.

¹⁷ Two organizations have been created to promote the study of Hroswitha's works—one in London (founded in 1926) and one in New York (1944)—and a sizable bibliography of modem commentaries on her writings now exists. Surveys of much of the literature and the major disputes in the interpretation of Hroswitha's work will be found in Ann Lyon Haight, Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Her Times, Her Works, and a Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Hroswitha Club, 1965); and Bert Nagel, Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1965).

¹⁸ Hroswitha constituted such a challenge to common prejudices concerning medieval women that in the mid-nineteenth century an effort was made to argue her out of existence. Joseph von Aschbach, "Roswitha und Conrad Celtes," Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungsberichte 56 (Vienna, 1867), maintained that she was a historical absurdity and an impossibility. He claimed that her Latin was too good and her knowledge of the world too extensive for a woman of her supposed generation and vocation, and he suggested that her works were forgeries created by Conrad Celtes, her reputed "discoverer," which he foisted off on his fellow humanists as a kind of elaborate scholarly joke. Aschbach's thesis met early opposition from Rudolf Köpke, "Hrotsvit von Gandersheim," Ottonishe Studien 2 (Berlin, 1869), but it was a long time before the Hroswitha manuscripts received an adequate evaluation by paleographers which put their authenticity beyond doubt. See the complaint of Edwin Zeydel, "The Authenticity of Hrotswitha's Works," Modern Language Notes 61 (1946): 50-55.

¹⁹ Rudolf Wolkan et al., Das deutsche Drama (Munich, 1925).

²⁰ In 1908 Bemarda Triimper published a book dealing with Hroswitha's women, Hrotsvithas Frauengestalten (Miinster, 1908), but later scholars have tended to interpret Hroswitha's legends and dramas as studies of concepts of martyrdom and chastity for which questions of sexual differentiation are of secondary importance. Hugo Kuhn, Dichtung und Welt im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1959), 94-100, suggests that an elaborate structure of major and minor themes can be seen linking Hroswitha's plays and paralleling the internal organization of her legends. Kuhn sees her work as a study of the eternal conflict between the world and the Christian faith which is as real for men as it is for women. Men play a larger role in the legends and women in the dramas, but both the legends and the dramas are part of one scheme designed to illustrate Christian faith in its struggle with a hostile world. Marianne Schütze-Pflugk, Herrscher- und Märtyrer-Auffassung bei Hrotsvit von Gandersheim (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1972), links Hroswitha's works together as studies of concepts of Christian heroism, of which she identifies three types: "Glaubensund Keuschheitshelden," "Glaubenshelden," and "Märtyrer als Mann des Hofes und des Hochadels."

But dissatisfaction with many of the proposed schemes for uncovering a structure in Hroswitha's poetic program has moved Dietlind Heinze, Die Praefatio zu den 'Draman' Hrotsvits von Gandersheim—ein Programm?" (Karlsruhe: O. Berenz, 1973), to deny that even the plays, which on the surface appear to be the most coordinated of Hroswitha's works, follow any "Theorie" or "Schema" (72). It is probably unreasonable to hope that all of Hroswitha's compositions can be demonstrated to be parts of one consistently executed plan, but certain significant correlations and enduring attitudes do seem to appear if her writings are approached not just as explorations of the concepts of chastity and martyrdom but as statements by a woman about the different spiritual situations of men and women in her society.

²¹ Kuhn (99): "Die Legendenreihe handelt ausser in Anfang und Schluss (I und 8) durchweg von Männer [note, however, that the third legend, the "Gongolf," features a woman who is central to the fate of the man whose martyrdom is being narrated], während das Dramenbuch (trotz der hierin irreführenden Titel) durchweg Frauen und mit ihnen das Thema der virginitas in den Mittelpunkt stellt [note, however, that virginity is also the central theme of the "male" legend of the "Pelagius" and a virtue endorsed for both sexes; see "Maria," 395-400]."

²² Otto's crucial struggles with the Magyars are dismissed in twenty-two lines, while fifty-five are given to narrating the death of his wife, Edith. Over two hundred lines of the fifteen-hundred-line poem are used to describe the escape of Queen Adelaide from Berengar and her subsequent marriage to Otto. The episode concerning Adelaide's flight is one of the most completely developed in the whole poem.

²³ Helene Homeyer, Hrotsvithae Opera (Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1970), 13-14, points out the importance of the effect of the church's liturgy on Hroswitha's works: "In den Legenden und Dramen, in denen die Jungfräulichkeit verherrlicht wird, sind 'Entlehnungen' aus der Liturgie des Weihnachtsund Osterfestkreises und der Marienfeste besonders zahlreich. Anderes stammt aus den rituellen Gebeten, die das klösterliche Leben begleiteten: so spielt z. B. der Gedanke an die Schwachheit des weiblichen Geschlechts eine Rolle (Sap. III 3 u. ö.) …," etc.

²⁴ "Quamvis etiam metrica modulatio femineae fragilitati difficilis videatur et ardua, solo tamen semper miserentis supernae gratiae auxilio, non propriis viribus, confisa.…" (8) The edition of Hroswitha's works employed throughout the paper is Homeyer's (ibid.), and when translations occur, they are the author's own.

²⁵ "mei opusculum vilis mulierculae vestra admiratione dignum duxistis." (3)

²⁶ "arbitrantes mihi inesse aliquantulam scientiam artium, quarum subtilitas longe praeterit mei muliebre ingenium." (3)

²⁷ "tanto amplius in me iure laudaretur, quanto muliebris sensus tardior esse creditur." (9)

²⁸ "Si tamen sanae mentis examen accesserit, quae res recte pensare non nescit, quanto sexus fragilior scientiaque minor, tanto venia erit facilior.…" (9)

²⁹

Sed nec hoc fragilis fas esse reor mulieris
Inter coenobii positae secreta quieti,
Ut bellum dictet, quod nec cognoscere debet."
(243-45)

³⁰

"Nunc scribenda quidem constant, quae fecerat
 idem
Augustus solium retinens in vertice rerum.
Tangere quae vereor, quia femineo prohibebor
Sexu, nec viii debent sermone revolvi.…"
(1485-88)

Marianne Schütze-Pflugk (62) suggests that Hroswitha's feminine reserve could sometimes serve as a useful excuse for not discussing potentially delicate events: "Es leuchtet ein, dass z. B. die politischen Konflikte innerhalb der Ottonischen Familie ein peinliches Thema darstellen für eine Kanonisse, deren Äbtissin die Tochter des rebellischen Königsbruders Heinrich und die Schwester der ebenso rebellischen Heinrich des Zänkers war."

³¹

Quem matrona videns nec mortalem fore
 credens,
Obstupuit mentis iuxta morem muliebris,
Procumbens subito magno terrore coacta."
(49-51)

³²

"Quae, pro defectu mentis solito muliebris
Vivere spementes citiusque mori cupientes,
In lacrimando modum voluerunt ponere
  nullum."
(544-46)

³³

Illaque, mollitiem iam deponens muliebrem
Et sumens vires prudenti corde viriles.…"
(168-69)

³⁴ Not all women were created equal, however, for the hierarchy of worth extended through the class of womankind and explained the superiority of women of royal birth to those of commoner origins. As Bert Nagel (46) observes, "Dass die jüngere Gerberg II, infolge ihrer königlichen Abkunft höhere gelehrte Bildung besitzt, erscheint ihr ganz natürlich. Die ständische Rangordnung der Welt erachtet sie als richtig und gottgewollt."

³⁵ Hroswitha introduces this theme in the letter to her patrons which preceded the plays. It is not directly stated, but the drift of her thought seems to be that her literary achievements as a woman redound all the more to God's glory because His power is revealed all the more clearly in the fact that He has been able to use a weak feminine instrument for worthy spiritual purposes.

³⁶ "Plures inveniuntur catholici, cuius nos penitus expurgare nequimus facti, qui pro cultioris facundia sermonis gentilium vanitatem librorum utilitati praeferunt sacrarum scripturarum. Sunt etiam alii, sacris inhaerentes paginis, frequentius lectitant et, dum dulcedine sermonis delectantur, nefandarum notitia rerum maculantur." (1-2)

³⁷ "quo eodem dictationis genere, quo turpia lascivarum incesta feminarum recitabantur, laudabilis sacrarum castimonia virginium iuxta mei facultatem ingenioli celebraretur." (3)

³⁸ "praesertim cum feminea fragilitas vinceret et virilis robur confusioni subiaceret." (5) Paul von Winterfeld, Deutsche Dichter des Lateinischen Mittelalters (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1913), 110, saw this statement as a basis for according Hroswitha the honor of recognition as a precursor of modern feminism.

Vor allem aber muss Hrotsvit den emporstrebenden Frauen unserer eigenen Zeit, unseren Gymnasiastinnen, Studentinnen, Lehrerinnen, Dichterinnen als die grosse, um Jahrhunderte voraus geeilte Standartenträgerin erscheinen. Hrotsvit es sich selbst deutlich bewusst, mit ihren Schöpfungen für das Recht der Frauen zu streiten und nach Ruhm und Ehre der Männer zu ringen. Ihre Dramen sind in dieser Hinsicht fast soziale Tendenzstücke. Überall bleibt in ihnen die Frau Siegerin im Kampf gegen männliche Gewalt und Brutalität.… So wäre diese Nonne wohl die rechte Patronin der modernen, neuen Zoelen zugewendeten Frau, die ja wie sie oft der fraulichen Krone des Lebens, der Liebe, entsagen muss, wenn sie auf Stolz und Ehre hält.

³⁹ Hroswitha's Virgin remains quite "female" in her relationship to the male Trinity. She is the vehicle of the incarnation, and Hroswitha has Christ accord her recognition as the only person who could have served in that capacity ("Ascension of the Lord," 82-83: "Inveni solam prae cunctis te quia castam condignamque meum corpus generasse sacratum"). But Mary claims no powers of her own. Salvation is the result of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, not of the incarnation, and Mary is more the beloved mother of God than she is the queen of heaven.

⁴⁰ The "Maria"—with 900 lines—is two to three times as long as all but one of the other seven legends. Its nearest contender is the "Gongolf' at 580 lines. The others range from the "Ascension" at 150 to the "Agnes" at 459.

⁴¹ Hroswitha gives her a rather anomalous birth which hints at the conditions of her own son's conception. Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna, are represented as having separated in chagrin over their sterility. After months of absence from each other's company angels bring them the news that God will grant them a child. Joachim hastens home from the desert, and Anna goes out to meet him with the news, "quaeque fui sterilis, concepi gaudi prolis" (261), and nine months later ("noveno … mense," 264) Mary is born.

⁴² Mary's lifestyle realizes the condition which St. Augustine imagined to have been Eve's potential before the fall (City of God, xiv).

⁴³ "Maria," 394; Sapientia, v, 29; etc.

⁴⁴Sapientia, ix, 8.

⁴⁵I.e., "thalamus": "Agnes," 107, and Gallicanus I, v, 2.

⁴⁶ The metaphor is developed with particular vividness in the Agnes legend (41-110) where the saint compares her earthly and heavenly suitors.

⁴⁷I.e., "socrus": Sapientia, iv, 3.

⁴⁸ She and her father have a brief, but pointed, conversation on the subject of matrimony:

Constantinus: Desiderat te sponsam habitum
 ire.
Constantia: Me?
Constantinus: Te.
Constantia: Malim mori.
Constantinus: Prescivi.
(I, ii, 3)

⁴⁹Primordia, 315-60.

⁵⁰ Marianne Schütze-Pflugk, 43, has a somewhat more mundane theory concerning the vacillations in Gerberga's career: "Die Darstellung der Äbtissin Gerberga beschränkt sich zum grossen Teil auf die Geschichte ihres verlöbnisses mit Bernhard. Während die Wahrscheinlichkeit dafür spricht, dass der Tod ihrer Schwester und das Streben der liudolfingischen Familie, das Eigenstift durch den Primat der eigenen Töchter fast in Händen zu halten, die Gründe für den Bruch mit Bernhard bilden, lässt Hrotsvit Gerberga längst vorher heimlich mit Christus verlobt sein, omnino sponsum spernens animo moriturum. (Primordia 323)"

⁵¹Primordia, 296-300.

⁵²

"Si velit angelicae pro virginitatis honore
Ipsius astrigera sponsi caelestis in aula." (4-5)

⁵³ "Sicque locus scelerum domus efficitur precularum." (253)

⁵⁴ The heroine of Hroswitha's first play, the Gallicanus, sets the stage for her own struggle by praying to Christ in the name of St. Agnes: "Amator virginitatis et inspirator castitatis, Christe, qui me precibus martiris tuae Agnetis a lepra pariter corpis et ab errore eripiens gentilitatis invitasti ad virgineum tui genitricis thalamum in quo tu manifestus es verus deus retro exordium natur a deo patre, idenque verus homo ex matre natus in tempore…" (I, v, 2)

⁵⁵

Hirena: Melius est, ut corpus quibuscumque
   iniuriis maculetur, quam anima idolis
   polluatur.
Sisinnius: Si socia eris meretricum, non
   poteris polluta intra contubernium
   computari virginum.
Hirena: Voluptas parit poenam, necessitas
   autem coronam; nec dicitur reatus, nisi quod
   consentit animus.
—xii, 3

Similar ideas are to be discovered in the writings of early church fathers: e.g., Basilius of Ancyra (d. ca. 366), De Virginitate: "Were such virgins assaulted and raped, their souls will remain virginal, for, experiencing the death of the flesh, they remain uncorrupted, whatever they might have to submit to." Quoted from André Vaillant's edition, De Virginitate de St. Vasile; texte vieux slave, traduction française (Paris, 1943), and translated into English by Tavard, Women, 61.

⁵⁶ "Maria," 391-93:

"Nam Deus in templo gaudet requiescere
 mundo
Mentibus et sobriis, nec delectatur in illis,
Crimine quos magno maculat lasciva libido."

⁵⁷ "Basilius," 136-37:

"Congaude iam nunc servo miserae tibi caro;
At post aeternis poenis maerens capieris!"

⁵⁸ "Agnes," 23-24 and 61-62:

"qui, genitus sacra de virgine, solus
Sponsus castarum necnon decus est animarum.

O fili montis merito dampnande perennis,
O fomes sceleris, contemptor et omnipotentis."

⁵⁹ I, ii, 3: "Malim mori."

⁶⁰ I, 2: "nec ad corruptionem integritatis ullis rebus compelli poterimus."

⁶¹ Heinze, Die Praefatio, 53. Reuther, "Misogynism," 165, catalogues passages from Augustine (De Bono Conj. 3. 15; De Bono Viduit. 8 and 11) and Jerome (Epistola 107. 13) which argue that the marital act is "intrinsically debasing to a woman." Schütze-Pflugk, 20-21, suggests that Hroswitha can conceive of sexual affection only as a "Raserei"—not a natural impulse of the human spirit but a drive which is imposed on it from without by Satan. Those who fall in love are "Liebeskranken" who are to be described as "stultus, infelix, miser, und misellus" (27).

⁶²I Tim. 2:15 (RSV): "Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty."

⁶³ i, v: "nam nostrae conjuges fastidiendo nos contempnunt adeo, ut dedignatur nobiscum comedere, quanto minus dormire."

⁶⁴ The early church seems to have generally discouraged this kind of behavior, and at a later period St. Bernard certainly had a very dubious opinion of it: "To be always with a woman and not to have intercourse with her is more difficult than to raise the dead. You cannot do the less difficult; do you think I will believe that you can do what is more difficult?" Quoted in R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), 314.

⁶⁵ For example, Gesta Ottonis, 66-124; Primordia, 305-14.

⁶⁶ The case of Countess Oda (Primordia, 296-300) has already been mentioned (note 51).

⁶⁷ iv, 3: "Ad hoc vos materno lacte affluenter alui, ad hoc delicate nutrivi, ut vos caelesti, non terreno, sponso traderme, quo vestri causa socrus aeterni regis dici meruissem."

⁶⁸ iv, 4: "Hoc exopto, ut vestra virginitater coroner, ut vestro martirio glorificer."

⁶⁹ v, 29: "spes uteri mei unica."

⁷⁰ vii, 2: "Vale, proles dulcissima; et, cum Christo iungaris in caelo, memento matris, iam patrona effecta te parientis."

⁷¹ ix, 8: "quamvis non possum canticum virginitatis dicere, te tamen cum illis merear aeternaliter laudare."

⁷² Jerome, Epistola xxii, 20.

⁷³ The hermit who engineers her salvation is shocked beyond belief to learn in conversation with her that she sins not in ignorance of God but in full acceptance of the fact of his existence: "O Christe, quam miranda tuae circa nos benignitatis patientia, qui te scientes vides peccare et tamen tardas perdere!" (iii, 5)

Some of the earlier forms of the Thais legend contained excuses for Thais's conduct in that they had her mother bear responsibility for placing her in a brothel, but Hroswitha heightens the sense of Thais's sin by omitting reference to mitigating circumstances. For a study of the legend and Hroswitha's narration of it, see Oswald R. Kuehne, A Study of the Thais Legend (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1922).

⁷⁴ vii, 12: "Quid inoportunius quidve poterit esse incommodius, quam quod in uno eodemque loco diversa corporis necessaria supplere debebo. Nec dubium, quin ocius fiat inhabitabilis prae nimietate foetoris."

⁷⁵ Preface to the legends, 8; letter of recommendation for the plays, 3, 9; prologue to the history of Otto's reign, 9; etc.

⁷⁶ She is the adulterous wife of St. Gongolf, the only one of Hroswitha's female sinners to die unrepentent.

⁷⁷ Hroswitha's examples of cases where weak women triumph over strong men are not confined to what one might interpret as the wish fulfillments of her works of fiction. In the Gesta Ottonis (558-587) she described Queen Adelaide's flight from Berengar as an example of a situation in which God's grace enabled a lone woman to frustrate all the earthly powers which lay at the disposal of males.

⁷⁸ William Hudson, "Roswitha of Gandersheim," English Historical Review 3 (July 1888): 445: "In Hroswitha's hands Christianity is throughout represented by the purity and gentleness of women while paganism is embodied by what she describes as 'the vigour of men' (virile robur)."

⁷⁹ Paphnutius gives the repentent Thais a kind of miniature lecture on free grace. When she shows a reluctance to leave her cell and expresses the fear that she has not yet done enough penance to merit God's grace, he calms her fears by telling her, "Gratuitum dei donum non pensat humanum meritum, quia, si meritis tribueretur, gratia non diceretur" (xii, 5). For a discussion of Hroswitha's theology of grace and its possible sympathies with Gottschalk's theories of double predestination, see Erich Michalka, Studien über Intention und Gestaltung in den dramatischen Werken Hrotsvits von Gandersheim (Heidelberg: Ruprecht-Karl-Universitat, 1968), 114-18 and 189.

⁸⁰ Alice Kemp Welch, "A Tenth-Century Dramatist, Roswitha the Nun," in her Of Six Mediaeval Women (London: Macmillan and Co, 1913), 20: "The subject which dominates her horizon is that of Chastity. Treated by her with didactic intent, this really resolves itself into a conflict between Christianity and Paganism—in other words, between Chastity and Passion—in which Christianity triumphs through the virtue of Woman."

⁸¹ Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, "Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medieval Theology," in Religion, ed. Ruether, 225: "Medieval medical theory assumed that the sexual needs of the woman were as great if not greater than those of the man."

⁸² There may be a slight reference to such a problem in the opening lines of the legend of St. Agnes:

"Virgo, quae, vanas mundi pompas ruituri
Et luxus fragilis cupiens contempnere camis."

⁸³ I, 26: "Deinde, inito certamine, nunc ora naresque pugnis frangendo, nunc armis vicissim eiciendo, decurrentis illuvie sanguinis madefaciunt limina lupanaris."

⁸⁴ Hroswitha was aware of the homosexual alternative. Her legend of St. Pelagius tells the story of a youth who chose martyrdom over the affections of a pagan king.

⁸⁵ The careers of the prostitutes in the Abraham and the Paphnutius are lamented not just for the degradation of the women involved but for the large company of men who found ruin through the two sinful females. The repentent anchorite of the Abraham spends the remainder of her life in an attempt to become an example of virtue for the conversion of the men who earned perdition through her (ix, 4). The context for the interpretation of Thais's story is established by the opening scene of the Paphnutius, a lecture on the principles of divine harmony which are established in the universe and disrupted by human sinners. Thais is a powerful source of disorder in the creation, and she is explicitly blamed not only for her own damnation, but for the ruin of many others: "quae non solum sese perditioni dedit, sed etiam perplures secum ad interitum trahere consuevit" (ix, 2).

⁸⁶ 1 Pet. 3: 7.